IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2016 - 116

5. watsoN (iBM, 2006)
The truest successor to the chess-playing computer Deep
Blue, Watson is IBM's best attempt so far at a machine
that thinks like we do. Built first to compete on the TV
game show Jeopardy!-which it did, in 2011, winning
comfortably against two previous champions-Watson is a natural language AI with an immense knowledge store. We've already included Jill Watson on
this list because of the specific influence that version of Watson will have on future computer scientists, but the pure Watson machine is even more
impressive. It can understand questions that a
human would ask and reply with detailed information taken from hundreds of millions of pages
of content.
On the cute side, this means it can do things
like invent new recipes on the fly, with unusual
combinations of ingredients that a human chef
wouldn't consider mixing. But Watson also
literally has lives in its hands-IBM is working in partnership with hospitals around the
world, using Watson as an AI consultant to
aid doctors in diagnosing ailments and
recommend ing treatments.

part bot, part human, ready to serve. The idea is that it can
perform tasks like buying tickets or arranging dates with
friends with nothing more complex than messaging back and
forth. It'll also eventually integrate with all the other bots that
Facebook wants people and businesses to build-so if you
ask your bot to call a cab, for example, it'll then talk to the
cab company's bot to arrange it.
It's plugged into Facebook, though, which instantly gives
M a huge amount of knowledge of people's most personal
thoughts and secrets. That makes the limits built into its
actions more than a little important.

Facebook already knows everything about you (and 1.6
billion other people), can influence your mood by
tweaking what you see in your News Feed, and persuade you to vote. So if M were to go rogue, it would
be less like a Bond sidekick and more like a Bond villain. It might decide to tell your crush you've been
stalking his or her Facebook page or retag all those
hideous photos you wanted to forget when you're feeling particularly low. Worse still: It could remind onthe-fence Americans to vote for Trump.
-Olivia Solon

116 IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

OCTOBER 2016

Watson is probably the smartest bot on this list and
good enough at natural language to appear as scarily intelligent as ELIZA seemed to people in the
1960s. It might well also look the most like the
near-future of bots, more so than the home automation hubs on which the big technology firms are
focusing.
-Ian Steadman

4. worDsMith (autoMateD iNsights, 2014)
Automated Insights automatically writes news articles for
major publishers, including the Associated Press, specializing in data-heavy subjects like sports and finance. You
probably read Wordsmith's work all the time without realizing it. And, if you work in the media, you're already
aware that something like Wordsmith could well be coming for your job in the near future. But the power these
journobots hold is immense-in 2013 a single erroneous
tweet sent from AP's Twitter account, stating that there
had been an attack on the White House, sent the U.S. stock
market into free fall.

Imagine the damage that could be done to the economy
by a bot spinning out thousands of fake news stories,
distributed through some of the world's most trusted
media sources.
-Olivia Solon

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2016